Rob Sand

Economy

n Rob’s first term the office has identified more waste, fraud, and abuse than any other single term from any other State Auditor. Rob has also improved accountability for corrupt public officials by creating a position for law enforcement professionals to work on its investigations from Day 1, helping to ensure the investigations will work well in Court. He took the University of Iowa to the Supreme Court (the most liberal public institution in the State of Iowa) and won a victory for transparency. He’s demanded that public employees who commit sexual harassment be held personally accountable for their deeds, to reduce losses to taxpayers and better discourage harassment. He had two groundbreaking separate investigations of Medicaid’s performance in Iowa. They show that not only do medical providers in Iowa believe the program has made the quality of care and access to care worse, but also that the private companies running the program are far more likely to illegally deny care to Iowans than when the program was publicly run, routinely violating the contracts and the laws Iowans are paying them to follow. Here’s a live TV interview on the larger one. He also was a national accountability leader on the pandemic response. He issued what is believed to be the first COVID-related audit in the nation. He also had some of the only official findings of misspent COVID relief dollars by elected officials– demonstrating a willing to put himself in the crosshairs of powerful politicians in order to do his job. His review of Iowa’s prohibition on self-promotion with Taxpayer Funds criticized not only Iowa’s Republican Governor but also the Democratic-controlled Polk County Board of Supervisors, and he advocated for the law to be expanded to prevent additional politicians from promoting themselves in ads taxpayers pay for. Focused on seeking truth, he also issued an audit of Iowa’s COVID-19 data that found issues were caused by out-of-state companies and other issues, not wrongdoing by the Reynolds administration. Learn more

He moved his office from printed reports to electronic-only to save tens of thousands of dollars annually. He created a statewide government efficiency program called Public Innovations and Efficiencies (PIE). In just its first year, it had approximately 350 participating governments from all 99 counties. In its second year, it had over 500 participants, and an increase of over 25% in the number of efficiency practices they had in place. In the long run, the cumulative taxpayer savings the program assists in generating should total into the hundreds of millions of dollars. PIE is so effective that the Republican State Auditor of Mississippi has announced he is copying it. Learn more